When a thing turns as ugly as the NBA lockout grew Monday, the easiest cop-out is to proclaim that both sides are wrong, type something about “a pox on both your houses” to show you have some vague but not quite accurate recall of Shakespeare, and then say how sorry you feel for the fans.

I hope to avoid all of the above. There is only one set of “bad guys,” and those are the owners as represented by Commissioner David Stern. I don’t see the players as bad guys in this deal. There’s another word for it.

I believe it’s called “idiots.”

As far as sympathy for the fans, well, quite frankly, I hear very little around town from people saying how much they miss the NBA right now. And that’s with the Mavericks as defending champions.

I can only imagine where an NBA lockout would rank on the local interest meter if the Mavericks had made an untimely first-round exit against Portland.

But the news Monday that players would reject the owners’ latest offer and seek refuge in the courts came as little surprise, nor did it show imagination on the part of the NBA Players Association.

Without getting bogged down in legalese, the NBA players are not set up to win court battles as the NFL players were last off-season. The NFLPA knew it could get favorable rulings in Minnesota from Judge David Doty as it had before.

The NBA, on the other hand, had already predicted its players would go this route and filed an unfair labor practice charge to protect itself.

The NBA players are hanging their hats on the recruitment of litigator David Boies, who apparently was considered a master in the courtroom working on behalf of the NFL. Now he will try his luck with the other side.

“We think we’ve got a stellar team to file this antitrust action against the NBA,” players association director Billy Hunter announced Monday.

You were hoping for Kobe and Kevin Durant?

Sorry, you’ll have to settle for Boies and Jeffrey Kessler for the next few months.

What Monday’s announcement signaled mostly is that players do what agents tell them to do. It’s supposed to work the other way around, but it almost never does.

And the agents aren’t the ones who stand to suffer short-term financial pains during a lockout because, unlike players, their time in this league is not limited by how long they can defend the pick-and-roll.

If anyone — lawyers, agents, players — connected with the players association thinks sitting out an entire season is the way to go, I would ask them to see how that worked for the NHL. The league shut down for the entire 2004-05 season. The players finally settled for a hard salary cap more punitive than the original offers.

The more paychecks NBA players miss, the less interest they will have in maintaining the integrity of the mid-level exception.

Stern may not be well-liked by the media, as his every utterance is criticized by those who cover the NBA on a daily basis. I understand that he’s insufferable.

Sometimes, though, insufferable people are right. When he says the players are heading down a losing path, take that as rhetoric at your own risk. Time will prove him to be correct.

But I think what we have learned in this unfortunate process is that Stern is not the all-powerful commissioner he once was. It is the hard-line owners who are driving this thing, who refuse to compromise in even the slightest ways.

Let’s say you buy the owners’ contention that they had a failing business model and were losing, as a league, $300 million a year. It’s a shaky argument at best, given the constantly rising value of franchises, but let’s buy into it for the moment.

Well, the players’ willingness to go from receiving 57 percent of the revenues in the last CBA to 50 percent in this one essentially took care of all those losses. All the players wanted in return last week were some “givebacks” in a few areas related to the luxury tax, sign-and-trade rules, etc.

The owners said no. Basically, they refused to bend enough to matter.

Stern, I believe, would have gladly budged having already won the larger fight. But the hard-line owners — those who didn’t want the players to get even 50 percent — didn’t want to win by unanimous decision (although this was going to be a hugely one-sided decision in their favor, anyway).

The hard-liners wanted to win by knockout.

They sent the players through the ropes. I don’t know what the ultimate prize is for shutting down a money-making league.

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About Tim Cowlishaw

Tim Cowlishaw has been The Dallas Morning News' lead sports columnist since July 1998. Prior to that he covered the Cowboys for six seasons and the Stars for three as a beat reporter. He also covered the Rangers as a backup beat writer and was the San Jose Mercury News' beat writer on the San Francisco Giants in the late 1980s.

Tim has been appearing regularly on ESPN"s "Around the Horn" since the show made its debut in November 2002. He also worked with ESPN as part of the network's "NASCAR Now" coverage in 2007-08.

Favorite Dallas restaurants: Park, Nick and Sam's, Kenichi.

Worst sports prediction: His first in college ... that Earl Campbell had no shot at the Heisman Trophy.

Best sports memories: Seeing the Dallas Stars hoist the Stanley Cup long after midnight in Buffalo, watching the Dallas Cowboys win the Super Bowl and Texas win the national title in perfect Rose Bowl settings.